Sitting at Straight
Sitting was a ritual exercise at Straight. It reminds me of Egyptian art. We had to sit up so our backs didn't touch the chair. In this way, certain muscles were always tensed. Certain habits of structure were laid in. Connective tissue is wrapped around everything, that's why acupuncture needles affect distant parts of the body and organs. If you sit for a long time you retrain your muscles to hold you up in a sitting rather than a standing posture. Your pelvis is supposed to be pulled down by your hamstrings. If it isn't, your spine is in a different alignment and your body is struggling to hold itself up when it really should feel more like one of those tensile structures with all the rods and the wires running through them, there should be ease in the feeling of moving around, not tenseness. If you body is aligned differently you have different organ system issues and this affects your mind and emotions as well.
Now picture the group sitting facing straight forward. Then picture one person, standing up, anywhere in the group you want to imagine it. Then imagine all those forward facing bodies turning toward the person, all bodies twisting toward one focal point, all heads swiveled, all eyes facing one focal point. You are now in a charged state.
All the twisting and holding in a sitting-on-a-chair position, even from a purely structural anatomical point of view, is going to cause some imbalances. I am very curious about this and I intend to consult chinese medicine practitioners. Because the connective tissue is interconnected with your organs, a posture imbalance practiced for a period of time would affect your organs. Let me insert that I don't have a formal education in chinese medicine, I am just thinking about some things I have read and observed.
Then, when you did stand up, it was in one of four ways: you were the focal point of the group during a rap, you were grabbed by the beltloop like an animal by a tether to be walked not under your own guidance system but by the guidance system of the cult, or you were in the role of animal handler and grabbing someone else by the belt loop. Or, granted special status, you moved in a set of rules that governed your movement to fulfill certain duties and the tickets required to pass certain gates. That is a highly regimented system set up around your movement. You no longer stretch because you need to, take a piss, go outside to breathe air, head out for a few to get something to eat, just altogether leave, get in a car, turn on the music and drive away. In order to get to that car you had to either bust through something, all the fear and the physical threats, or you had to somehow get squished into and through that ritualized disability to actually move in any way relative to personal choice. That is a severe handicapping of spirit.
